MP3 help: cleaning up songs/titles

Everything else
1

I just recently bought a used iPod from a co-worker and was all set to put my meager collection onto this 20GB mammoth. However, I haven’t been very dilligent when I ripped most of my collection months ago. I didn’t rename many of the files, or I was lazy in typing in artists’ names (sometimes it was 10000 Maniacs, sometimes it was 10,000 Maniacs).

But now when I drag things over to my iPod, it sees three different artists or four different album titles. It is generally a mess. I’ve thought about re-ripping most of my music collection because when I originally did it, I picked 92kbs for no good reason, and I am now thinking about re-ripping some of it at a higher bit rate.

I have spent all afternoon struggling with CDex and CD-DA-X-Tractor trying to get these damn things to lookup to CDDB and auto-name all this stuff. The result has been a loss of time, patience, and a little of my hair.

Does anybody know if it’s possible to have rename stuff that’s already ripped? If not, what programs do you use that support the CDDB auto-naming stuff. I don’t relish the idea of typing in all that info for dozens of CDs.

Thanks.

2

Oh, c’mon, Jim, we’re all friends here. We KNOW that’s code for “those weenies on Kazaa don’t name their files consistently!” :-)

At any rate, if you ripped at 92K bps, you might was well just re-rip and pay better attention to the filenames and ID3 tags this time. Unless you’re a big fan of AM radio, 92K (probably 96, actually) bps isn’t going to make you happy.

If you use MusicMatch to rip, I’d suggest ripping at “custom” setting of 160K or 192K bps (depending on how good your ears are), or using VBR. (I’m not sure what the optimal VBR setting in Musicmatch is, since it uses an odd “percentage” instead of letting you specify bitrates.) I actually use Exact Audio Copy, but it’s quite a bit slower than MusicMatch, and you might not want to use it to grab an entire collection.

MusicMatch will automatically grab names of groups, albums, etc. from CDDB. Just record all of your albums from particular groups in the same sessions and take note of the group names. Somtimes they vary even on CDDB – 10,000 Maniacs vs. 10000 Maniacs, Beatles vs The Beatles, etc. You should never have to type in filenames or ID3 tag info, though – that’s all done automatically when you rip.

I’ve never found a good fully automatic renamer. If your MP3s have ID3 tags in them, there are a number of utilities such as MP3-Tag Studio which can create new filenames from the group and track name info stored in the files.

The vast majority of my “album” MP3s are ripped from my own collection. (I’ll admit a few exceptions, and if anyone can get the me the address of the surviving members of The Hughes Corporation or Paper Lace, I’ll happily send them each a dollar for the copies of “Rock the Boat” and “The Night Chicago Died” that I grabbed off Napster years ago.) But I do have a bunch of live tracks, many of which don’t even have ID3 tags in them. Those just need a long, free weekend…

3

Excellent info. Thanks for the help, Denny!

4

CDex is bad-ass, duder. I am using it to rip all my MP3s to 160-192 VBR now. There is an icon on the far right called “setup”. Click on it, and in the dialog box choose “remote CDDB”. Pick a remote server and put in some bogus e-mail addy. Now it should be able to fill those tags in for you no problem. Whenever you put in a CD, click on the “CDDB” icon above the previously mentioned “setup” icon and BAM! Done.

[size=2]Instructions above assume v1.30 or something with similar GUI.[/size]

5

It constantly frustrates me that no Music applications or players seem to recognise that a Band name starting with “The” should be alphabetically sorted by the next word.

As it is The Smiths, The Lightening Seeds and The Clean are all mashed up together.

The only band they get right is The The.

Elliott

6

I actually found a great little program called Tag Scanner which allows you to either rename audio files based on the ID2/ID3 tags or rewrite the tags based on the file names. It’s a great little program and I think it’ll do exactly what you want it to do – namely, allow you to standardize the artist names (assuming you have ID2/ID3 tags for the files already).

If not, you can rename all the files based on a standard convention, then have it write the tags from the file names.

Very useful, and runs in batch mode, so it’ll do all 18gb of your music collection at the same time.

asjunk

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Does anybody know if it’s possible to have rename stuff that’s already ripped? If not, what programs do you use that support the CDDB auto-naming stuff. I don’t relish the idea of typing in all that info for dozens of CDs.

There are quite a few programs that allow you to manage tags and file names, though I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that can correct names of MP3 files automatically using CDDB. CDDB is mostly useful for automatic tag and filename creation at the time of your rip/encode. It looks at the CD in the drive and then finds information matching that CD online.

For MP3 tags/filenames I use MP3 Tag Tools which is the best program of its type I have found that is free. It will allow you to create tags, both v 1 and 2, from file names or vice versa. You can also highlight all your songs from the same artist and unify the artists tag (you type what you want in the field and select write tag. You can do the same with album titles, etc. It gets messy with individual song titles or track numbers because you have to input them manually if they’re wrong, missing or can not be derived from the file name. Frankly, I’d reccomend reripping you collection using CDex, with CDDB and using a standard filename output (you can set this in the setup screen, I reccomend using “Artist - Album - Track Number - Song Title.mp3” You can just past this into that field:

%1 - %2 - %7 - %4

Use the Lame encoder, VBR ABR with a bitrate around 160 or 192Kbps.

8

I use MM8, with all the error checking on, set to multipass, etc, and rip at 320KB. So far, I’ve ripped about 42 CDs, and I’m only up to about 5.8GB. I’ve got a 20GB Zen, and that still leaves me with enough to rip the rest of my CD collection at 320KB.

Of course, if Jim has a 5GB iPod, he’ll have to be a bit more frugal,
but I think he can do pretty well at maximum VBR, which averages
out to be about 192KB in MM8.

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It’s actually a 20GB iPod, so ripping at a higher bit rate is an option. These are all great suggestions I’ll look into. Thanks for the tips, guys.

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Well, now you have at least one reason to use Windows Media Player 9. :)

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WMP 9 has improved a lot from the ass-tastic days of 7 and 8. I will say that.

The optimal settings for my (rather sensitive) ears is LAME, high quality, VBR level 3 (range is 1-10). You end up with 160kb/sec average typically.

Unless ABR has improved a lot, I’d stay away from that-- it artificially forces the bitrate to an overall average, which does not allow for extremely dynamic tracks to jack the bitrate up to what they really need to capture the music. Kinda defeats the purpose of variable bitrates IMO.

Basically the difference between ABR (average bit rate) and VBR (variable bit rate) is that VBR has no cap on the upper limit of bitrate. You give it a “guideline” bitrate which it uses as a median point, but it can scale all the way up to 320kb/sec if it deems that necessary. This works both ways of course; I’ve gotten tracks that ended up at 128kb/sec average if that’s all they need. What you sacrifice is predictable filesize, big whup.

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In addition to WMP9, iTunes correctly ignores leading "The"s. That may not help you now, but rumors seem to indicate that Apple’s going to port iTunes to Windows in the near future.

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I’ve always omitted articles from my mp3 filenames. “The_” makes my filenames 4 characters longer than they need to be.

14

Musicmatch Jukebox has a fairly good ID3 tag cleanup utility called Super Tagging. If you go through your MP3s by album, it will find best matches based on filename and existing ID3 info, and rewrite all the tags. You can then rename the files based on the new tags.

It has the advantage that it shows the album cover for what it thinks is the best choice for the song, which can help identification immensely.

15

Thanks to SquirrelKiller and Albert Woo, i’ll give WM9 a go. Although i’ve been religiously avoiding Microsoft product if at all possible.

Another question, i’ve recently got a 192M Nomad II MG. When I ripped and compressed my entire CD collection I did it at 256K or 320K, which is great when you have an 80GB harddrive just for media (30GB of MP3’s and 45GB of home videos). Now i’m putting these file onto the MP3 player, and of course they are really too big.

Is it worth finding a utility to resample from 256/320 to 128, or should I go through the painful process of recompressing over 300 CD’s?

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By the way, if anyone has an iPod, you can’t use Windows Media. Maybe the new iPods are different, though.

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You can just use LAME to downsample them. The quality level is so high that IMO there’s no reason to go back to the original CDs. And certainly once you compress down to 128kbps VBR (say, level 6 out of 10) – that’s what I would recommend for a mobile device – the difference between a 256kbps MP3 source and a CD source will be irrelevant.

The only downside to VBR is that it increases encoding time by about 4x (or more). Of course, it’s also much higher quality reproduction of the original source material-- way more “bang for the bit”. I think the single encoding time penalty is worth it; encode once, listen many times.

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We were only talking about WMP for playback. Although if you have the right MP3 codecs installed, you can also generate MP3s as well as WMA files from WMP9.

There’s one thing WMP9 does that’s super slick. It automatically encodes any inserted CD (into high-bitrate VBR media player 9 format) at about 10-15 seconds per track on my Athlon 1700+ HTPC, plus it lets you listen to the first track while it is being encoded.

If you’re impatient, WMP9 is very attractive. I was surprised how much it had improved over the horrendous 7 and 8 versions.

19

Thanks Wumpus, i’ll give it a try. Are you aware of any applications that let me queue up the entire directory (with subdirectory structure by album) to recompress, and output a new subdirectory structure for the new rate.

This means I could set it all up and leave it running overnight.

I understand what you mean about the compression rates. I intially began ripping with a PIII 500, and got to the point where I would rip around 10 albums a night, then queue them up to compress overnight - it was just too slow to compress on the fly. About 18 months ago I got a PIV 1.4, and suddenly I could compress on the fly, the limiting speed was how fast my DVD drive could rip! It’s amazing what a little processing power will do.

I’m just about to get a new machine, current plan is to get either the Asus or Gigabyte 865PE based mobo and a 2.6 PIV. Maybe I should wait for this before doing the re-encoding.

20

I just wanted to add that WMP9’s international language support is also top-notch. A lot of my collection consists of Japanese, Korean and Chinese music, and I prefer to display song titles and artists in their native language whenever possible (even though I can’t read any of those languages, heh heh). Most English-language media players I’ve tried can’t open or properly display ID tags for these files, especially those with Asian characters in their file names. Anyone having the same problem should give WMP9 a look.